AFCL: Analytic Federated Continual Learning for Spatio-Temporal Invariance of Non-IID Data

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Hauptverfasser: Tang, Jianheng, Zhuang, Huiping, He, Jingyu, He, Run, Wang, Jingchao, Fan, Kejia, Liu, Anfeng, Wang, Tian, Wang, Leye, Zhu, Zhanxing, Zhang, Shanghang, Song, Houbing Herbert, Liu, Yunhuai
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Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Tang, Jianheng
Zhuang, Huiping
He, Jingyu
He, Run
Wang, Jingchao
Fan, Kejia
Liu, Anfeng
Wang, Tian
Wang, Leye
Zhu, Zhanxing
Zhang, Shanghang
Song, Houbing Herbert
Liu, Yunhuai
author_facet Tang, Jianheng
Zhuang, Huiping
He, Jingyu
He, Run
Wang, Jingchao
Fan, Kejia
Liu, Anfeng
Wang, Tian
Wang, Leye
Zhu, Zhanxing
Zhang, Shanghang
Song, Houbing Herbert
Liu, Yunhuai
contents Federated Continual Learning (FCL) enables distributed clients to collaboratively train a global model from online task streams in dynamic real-world scenarios. However, existing FCL methods face challenges of both spatial data heterogeneity among distributed clients and temporal data heterogeneity across online tasks. Such data heterogeneity significantly degrades the model performance with severe spatial-temporal catastrophic forgetting of local and past knowledge. In this paper, we identify that the root cause of this issue lies in the inherent vulnerability and sensitivity of gradients to non-IID data. To fundamentally address this issue, we propose a gradient-free method, named Analytic Federated Continual Learning (AFCL), by deriving analytical (i.e., closed-form) solutions from frozen extracted features. In local training, our AFCL enables single-epoch learning with only a lightweight forward-propagation process for each client. In global aggregation, the server can recursively and efficiently update the global model with single-round aggregation. Theoretical analyses validate that our AFCL achieves spatio-temporal invariance of non-IID data. This ideal property implies that, regardless of how heterogeneous the data are distributed across local clients and online tasks, the aggregated model of our AFCL remains invariant and identical to that of centralized joint learning. Extensive experiments show the consistent superiority of our AFCL over state-of-the-art baselines across various benchmark datasets and settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_12245
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AFCL: Analytic Federated Continual Learning for Spatio-Temporal Invariance of Non-IID Data
Tang, Jianheng
Zhuang, Huiping
He, Jingyu
He, Run
Wang, Jingchao
Fan, Kejia
Liu, Anfeng
Wang, Tian
Wang, Leye
Zhu, Zhanxing
Zhang, Shanghang
Song, Houbing Herbert
Liu, Yunhuai
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Federated Continual Learning (FCL) enables distributed clients to collaboratively train a global model from online task streams in dynamic real-world scenarios. However, existing FCL methods face challenges of both spatial data heterogeneity among distributed clients and temporal data heterogeneity across online tasks. Such data heterogeneity significantly degrades the model performance with severe spatial-temporal catastrophic forgetting of local and past knowledge. In this paper, we identify that the root cause of this issue lies in the inherent vulnerability and sensitivity of gradients to non-IID data. To fundamentally address this issue, we propose a gradient-free method, named Analytic Federated Continual Learning (AFCL), by deriving analytical (i.e., closed-form) solutions from frozen extracted features. In local training, our AFCL enables single-epoch learning with only a lightweight forward-propagation process for each client. In global aggregation, the server can recursively and efficiently update the global model with single-round aggregation. Theoretical analyses validate that our AFCL achieves spatio-temporal invariance of non-IID data. This ideal property implies that, regardless of how heterogeneous the data are distributed across local clients and online tasks, the aggregated model of our AFCL remains invariant and identical to that of centralized joint learning. Extensive experiments show the consistent superiority of our AFCL over state-of-the-art baselines across various benchmark datasets and settings.
title AFCL: Analytic Federated Continual Learning for Spatio-Temporal Invariance of Non-IID Data
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12245